Have you ever dreamt of going to a bar in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center? Or having a social gathering in an art gallery? Well, your dream has come true with a new traveling exhibition entitled “1:1- Contemporary Large-Scale Drawings from the West Collection” featured in the Pollock Gallery in Hughes-Trigg.
The theme of the exhibit is to create life-size interiors “as if the viewer is stepping into a room at a one to one scale,” said Lee Stoetzel, director of the West Collection. There are small drawings in the gallery as well.
Based 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia, the West Collection is a semi-public institution with over 1,000 works of art on display. The West family, after which the collection is named, has been collecting and exposing work by little-known artists since the mid 1990s with the philosophy, according to Stoetzel, of “demystifying contemporary art” and making it more accessible, especially to students.
This show was brought to SMU through the efforts of Paige West, who had heard of the university, as well as Stoetzel, who graduated from SMU. The West’s mission has long since been “to meet young artists who are creating challenging and inventive work and to present an experience of this new art to the public.”
One of the artists featured in the Pollock Gallery is New York native Joan Linder with her piece “The Pink,” a life-size illustration of a friendly bar in Buffalo, N.Y. complete with grill and flair. She has always been an art student, but has only been doing 1:1 scale drawing as recently as eight years ago.
“I was interested in large-scale works that were composed of small marks,” Linder said in an online interview. “I was also interested in working from observation and with a material that did not forgive mistakes.”
What makes drawing at a realistic size different from other forms of art is a technique called “mark-making.” Comparing it to the art of Cartography, Linder said she uses mark-making to create surface abstraction thus creating an image of “close up marks that form imagery when viewed from a distance.”
Large-scale drawing, to Linder, transforms each piece into, not only an examination of a space or object, but a memorial, meditation and investigation of clips of life itself. She also feels it promotes creativity; she likes the complexity of representational imagery.
“I have always been interested in and created representational imagery,” Linder said. “That idea of recreating a space 1:1 scale and somehow the blurring boundary between representation and location.”
As far as spreading her emblematic ideas to open viewers, Linder is thrilled.
“It is very important for me to show my work to as many audiences as possible and I am very excited that a little piece of Buffalo is on display at the gallery.”
The Pollock Gallery is showing 1:1- Contemporary Large-Scale Drawings from the West Collection from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays as well as Saturdays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information call 214-768-4439.
